COLUMN: Do we have time to stop and take a breath?

When is the best time to experience what life has to offer: before or after college? Or is there time at all anymore? One could argue that once you’ve finished college, you’re officially in career mode climbing corporate ladders or studying deep sea organisms, and at this point there’s simply no more time to for meandering for the sake of meandering. But then of course you could also say once you’ve finished college you’re better equipped to take the world on and experience a little before you settle down and start a career.

I’ve been wondering all of this after an exercise I had to complete for my news writing class a few semesters ago. The point of the assignment was for the students to practice writing obituaries using our own lives as a template. As you can imagine, writing obituaries is a sobering enough experience even when you’re not in the unusual position to be writing your own. The problem that most of the students ran into was that at this point in our lives, there wasn’t enough content to fill a proper obituary (a problem most of us just solved by fabricating experiences to add some girth to the final product).

But of course what could we expect? After all, we were all college-age students. And this brings us back to square one. In our society, there’s so much pressure to find a career as quickly as possible, which is understandable, considering the fierce competition, shrinking fields, and abysmal economy. But is our generation going to miss out on the luxury of being able to bide our time before getting on the fast track?

It’s true that we’re living in a faster world, and so we have to be faster people. In a global economy you’re not just competing with your next-door neighbor anymore. Right now there are millions of people in hundreds of countries competing for your job.

In high school the singular goal of almost everyone I knew was to extensively travel after graduation, and almost all of them gave up that goal in lieu of getting a “head start on the job market.” I don’t know if this was due to pressure they felt from their peers or from their own convictions, but it was sad to see them so readily give up something I believe they sincerely wanted to do.

I think it’s important to consciously set aside time for endeavors like this, even at the expense of postponing your career. Once they advance in age, too many people regret not doing this, and by then, it’s definitely too late. Obligations and responsibilities surround them. So maybe life can wait. After all, you’ll only be young once, and the last thing you want is an empty obituary.